Field Observations
by Aoife-hime
Summary: In which Dorothy Ann makes a series of observations about her relationship with a certain boy and is led to one startlingly obvious conclusion.


**_01. Time spent with subject far exceeds time spent amongst others_**

"So then if you simplify the equation you get 3_i_ over – Carlos!" Dorothy Ann's voice rose with frustration and, she assumed, was the direct cause of the sudden cloud of sparrows migrating from their perches amongst the nearby bushes to the old oak tree a few yards away. Not that she liked to assume anything; however, she had noticed in the past that when her voice rose to such pitches, other creatures tended to make themselves scarce.

And nobody could make her voice rise quite like Carlos could.

For his part, Carlos had the good sense to look sheepish. "Sorry, D.A.," he said, with at least an ounce of sincerity behind his words. He rubbed his neck abashedly even as his eyes remained focused on the soccer field. "Guess I'm just too nervous about the game to think about math."

Still, the crease between Dorothy Ann's eyes remained (Carlos was going to give her wrinkles before she even got to college at the rate he was going) and her glare stayed sharp. She glared at him right up to the moment when Carlos turned his sheepish grin on her and laughed in that anxious sort of way that belied the usual exuberant confidence that he was so known for around school. He never would have laughed like that around his teammates or even around (most of) his other friends, and Dorothy Ann knew this fact quite well.

A soft sigh escaped her and her frown turned upward in a familiar yet exasperated grin.

"If you're too nervous," she asked while packing up her notes, "why did you even ask me to study with you now? Couldn't it have waited until _after_ the game is done?"

Carlos shrugged, his eyes resolutely focused on the shoelace he was currently tying. "But since you're here, you might as well stay for the game."

"CARLOS!" Her annoyed shriek was only partly masked by the flapping of dozens of tiny wings as the sparrow cloud flew off in search of more peaceful grounds.

**_02. Able to discuss all manner of topics with subject_**

It was 7:15 on a Wednesday morning and Dorothy Ann had the phone pressed to her ear like her life depended on it. Which, in her mind, it did.

"Carlos!" she said before he could manage a greeting. "Carlos, I need you to take extra good notes for me today in physics. I know you usually just copy my notes after class, but I can't come to school today and there's nobody else in the class I feel I can ask for their notes since the test is tomorrow and we were planning on studying together anyways and just thinking about missing the review makes me want to throw up even more than I already do and I couldn't sleep at all last night because of this fever and my pajamas are all sweaty and gross and I just feel disgusting –"

"Whoa, hey, Dorothy Ann? Slow down, what's going on? You're sick?"

"Yes, Carlos, I'm sick. I must have the flu or something – maybe just the stomach flu, which really isn't the flu at all but actually –"

"Okay, I get it, you're sick. And you must need me to take notes during the review today in physics."

"Really good notes. _Amazing_ notes. It's a big test, Carlos, and I can't believe I won't be there for the review, so you need to take absolutely perfect notes."

"Take notes, got it. I can do that."

"You can?" Dorothy Ann paused for a moment, ignoring the wave of nausea ebbing in her stomach. "Of course you can," she said aloud, as though she was just realizing that Carlos, distractable though he was, was more than capable of independently taking notes in a high school science class. And he was, too, since he'd managed to make it through to junior year with more than decent grades despite the fact that Dorothy Ann was only in a few of his classes. "You know, I don't know why you never take notes in that class. It would be so much easier for studying if you didn't have to copy mine every day after school and just took your own."

"You know, you don't sound very sick…"

"Trust me, Carlos. I wouldn't be sitting around in my pajamas talking to you on the phone at this hour on a school day if I wasn't sick." And to prove her point, she felt a particularly large wave of nausea rise up in her throat even as her vision spun a little from the combined effects of exhaustion and fever. Not that he could tell that over the phone.

"Huh. Okaaaaay. So yesterday when I took my cleats off after practice –"

"Carlos, what does this have to do with physics notes?" Dorothy Ann interrupted and felt lucky that it was only words that came out of her mouth.

"Yesterday," continued Carlos, proceeding to talk right over her question, "I saw that my entire toenail had turned blue and was oozing this whitish stuff when I pressed on it. I asked Juan on the team about it and he said that's a sure sign it's going to fall off…" Carlos's story was interrupted by the clattering sound of the phone on the other end of the line tumbling to the floor and feet moving as quickly as possible across carpeted floors. "Hello? D.A.?" Carlos stared at the phone for a second before hanging up. "I guess she _is_ sick after all."

**_03. Subject and I attend a number of special events together, including family birthdays, holidays, and extended car trips_**

The soccer tournament was an hour and a half away in a suburb that had sprawled just a tad too far away from the city to still be considered urban. The Ramons' minivan was hot and cramped, with Mikey taking up the middle of it, Carlos's equipment taking up the front passenger seat, and Carlos and Dorothy Ann in the back. Mr. Ramon didn't like to use the air conditioning unless it was absolutely necessary, and frankly, he felt that it was easier to keep the sweaty stink of Carlos's dirty shin guards at bay with the windows open rather than by using the air conditioning.

Never mind that it was the dead of summer and hot enough to make the asphalt shimmer in the afternoon sun.

"Remind me again, Carlos, why I agreed to come along?" Dorothy Ann felt a bead of sweat tickle her neck as it raced down her spine. Her tank top was practically melted into the seat's upholstery. Her new astronomy book lay forgotten next to her; she'd given up trying to read it when her fingers kept sticking to the thin pages, threatening to rip them.

"Because I'm a soccer star and you couldn't pass up a chance to see my phenomenal skills in action?"

"More like you begged me to come because you insisted your team never wins when I'm not there."

Carlos shrugged, an easy, good-natured grin playing about his lips. "And I was right, wasn't I? We didn't lose a single game today." The giant golden trophy ensconced on Carlos's lap was proof of that. Dorothy Ann just rolled her eyes.

"Correlation does not equal causation," she mumbled even as she felt a slight smile tug at the corner of her mouth. "But I'm happy that your team did well."

"Thanks," he grinned, and Dorothy Ann could easily see just how proud he was of the trophy he'd won. He stared at it with the same smile on his face he'd worn whenever something like this happened, be it creating a brand new instrument for their elementary school orchestra or getting an A on the chemistry final they stayed up all night studying for. "Hey, you know what?" he said, turning his attention back to her, and for just a moment Dorothy Ann forgot she had just spent an uncomfortable day sweating and getting a sunburned neck while watching a sport she still knew very little about. "I should treat my good luck charm to some ice cream! Dad," he called up to the front of the van, "we need to stop for ice cream!"

Dorothy Ann felt her eyebrows creep slowly upward. "_Your_good luck charm? I thought I was the team's good luck charm."

Carlos laughed happily. "That too."

**_04. Subject's family members are exceedingly familiar in their addresses and conversations with me_**

It was normal that Carlos's family hugged her whenever Dorothy Ann was over at their house. They were nice, genial people and she had known them for most of her life, so it didn't seem the least bit strange that his abuela always enveloped her in a hug that smelled of spices or that his father would hug her goodbye after an evening study session, usually muttering something about how she was the miracle that kept his son's grades up while he was at it.

Mikey wasn't much for hugging, but he always gave her a high five whenever she was over. This was usually followed by a smirk on his part and a, "Beat it, Mikey!" on Carlos's, but that, too, was just a routine part of her time spent with the Ramons.

Carlos was different, though. He smiled as much as anyone in the Ramon household and laughed even louder, but he almost never hugged Dorothy Ann. Or high fived her. Or even did an exploding fist bump like he did with Mikey sometimes. But that was normal, too, and Dorothy Ann never thought much of it.

Except for once. Once when they were reviewing for a pre-calculus test at the beginning of the school year, Carlos had tried to hug her. She had just pointed out an easier way to understand limits and Carlos's face had lit up with the unadulterated joy of someone who is just realizing he will not fail. But he hadn't bothered to change out of his soccer uniform that was sweaty and streaked with dirt from his game earlier that day and his hands were sticky from mopping up the lemonade he'd accidentally knocked over when he was clearing the table of his latest project ("I'm going to make a robotic snitch that's entirely autonomous so we can finally start a that Quidditch league!" he'd said excitedly when she asked what the copper wire and feathers were for). He smelled of grass and sweat and freshly squeezed lemons. But mostly sweat. Dorothy Ann had gulped when he started to lean over towards where she was sitting and spewed some excuse about really needing to use the bathroom immediately. Which was exactly where she went, despite the fact that she had gone not twenty minutes earlier and therefore simply ended up washing her hands twice to kill time. When she came back, Carlos was fiddling with the wire like nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Strangely enough, Mikey made sure to hug her on her way out that night, and she was fairly certain that it was his raucous laughter she heard leaking through the front door as she walked home.

**_05. Subject knows more about me than almost anyone else_**

It was a cold, grey day when Dorothy Ann's grandfather unexpectedly passed away. Fitting, really, because after her family got the phone call in the early hours of the morning, she felt just as empty and grey inside as the bleak, steely sky.

Honestly, she had felt too numb most of the day to cry. Dorothy Ann had insisted on going to school, because school was routine and her research said that routine was good in times like this. What her research hadn't told her was that even routine couldn't stop the dull ache in her chest nor could it stop her thoughts from wandering at every instant back to her grandfather. When she told her friends, Keesha had given her the biggest hug of her life between first and second period, Wanda had shared the Chinese mooncakes her mom had made during lunch, and she was unashamed to say that she clung to Phoebe's embrace at the end of the school day like it was a lifeline.

She sat out on her balcony that night, staring unseeingly through her telescope at the constellations that were hidden by the thick late autumn clouds. The cold air seeped easily through her sweater and even more easily through her pajama bottoms, but she was far too upset to realize that the reason she couldn't adjust her telescope anymore was because her fingers had long since gone numb.

Time seemed to move all at once then, for one moment she was warm and full from dinner and the next her stomach was groaning in protest of its emptiness and she felt a little dizzy with cold. But then a hand appeared over hers and her skin prickled with the sudden resurgence of warmth.

"You have to come inside now, D.A.," Carlos whispered, but in the quiet night air he might as well have been yelling. "It's too cold to look at stars tonight."

With his hands supporting her at her elbow, Carlos guided Dorothy Ann back inside. Her voice was frozen in her throat, either by cold or grief, just as her joints were frozen from sitting in the same place all night. She managed to walk rigidly over to her bed and immediately collapsed upon it. The room was so warm. Her skin tingled painfully as the heat worked its way back inside her, like water flowing through cracks in the pavement. Her toes tingled, her ears itched, and her cheeks flushed with warmth. They were wet, too.

It took her a moment to realize she was crying.

Sobbing, really, though her voice remained resolutely lodged somewhere in the middle of her throat. And because of that, they didn't speak. Not a word. But Carlos remained anyways, his hand surrounding hers until it was no longer cold and even long after. She barely remembered him leaving, though the absence of his hand on hers was painfully noticeable even after she had curled up in her bed and turned off the light.

When she woke up the next morning, her eyes were puffy and required much convincing to open. Her nose was stuffed on the one side and her head felt as if it was full of cotton, just like when a cold was beginning to sink its claws in. Blinking blearily, the red numbers of her alarm clock swam for a few moments before condensing into something that resembled a time. And on top of her clock…

Where had that teddy bear come from?

Dorothy Ann grabbed the bear, a fuzzy brown thing with a yellow flower in one of its paws, and stared at it. Slowly, the wheels of her mind turned despite the grief and the aches and the haze. Carlos. Carlos must have brought it over last night and left it there when he finally went home.

Though she didn't think she'd be able to smile for a long while, she felt the corner of her mouth twitch as something in her chest – an icy block of sadness, perhaps, or something very similar – broke apart and made her feel just a little lighter. She clutched the bear to her chest and curled back up under her blankets.

**_If all of the above are true, there can be only one conclusion..._**

Dorothy Ann thumbed through the old notebook, searching for the list she had been compiling for the last week. Diagrams of DNA double helices and genetic crosses from freshman-year biology lessons flashed by before she came upon what she was looking for.

Her data. Sound observations of a very un-sound world. Her eyes quickly scanned all that she had written, taking in the facts one by one but not daring to process them just yet. She had one more thing to add and she didn't want to reach any conclusions before all of the information was in place. Jumping to conclusions was not what a good scientist did, after all, and if there was one thing that was certain in this life, it was that Dorothy Ann was the consummate scientist.

She grabbed the nearest pen and began to write.

It was undeniable that she spent an inordinate amount of time with Carlos. She went to his soccer games even though she didn't find sports all that entertaining. She knew and liked his family as well as she knew and liked her own (better, even, on some days). She willingly spent hours in the same hot car as him even though he smelled like he had just played soccer all day (which he invariably had). She let him copy her notes when he didn't take any in class and studied with him for every quiz and test they had. She never felt awkward or weird sharing things about her life with him. She knew she could count on him to help her out of a pinch, no matter what that pinch was.

And then there were those posters that had been going up all around school recently, the ones advertising that age-old high school social function…

"According to my research," Dorothy Ann mumbled absently, flipping through her notes quickly now so as to better take in the big picture, "Carlos should take me to prom."

Wait.

'Carlos should take me to prom'. That _was_ what she just said, right? Prom, with the dresses and the tuxes and the corsages and the cheesy pictures. Carlos and prom and her and dancing and… Dorothy Ann paused and in that moment found herself swept up in a stomach-plummeting wave of realization.

Prom. Oh god, _prom_.

Before she could think any further on the subject, but with the lead weight of scientific certainty sinking rapidly in the pit of her stomach, Dorothy Ann grabbed her notebook and took off. She must have yelled something at her parents about where she was going because that's what she always did, but for all she knew her mouth made up some story about hiking in Nepal with sherpas. Though the sun was setting and the streets were largely cast in shadow, Dorothy Ann's feet flew surely across the pavement, never missing a step.

She didn't slow down until she was on Carlos's street, which was conveniently when the sharp stitch in her ribs started to make it nearly impossible to breathe rapidly, let alone at all. By the time she got to his front door, she was only marginally less out of breath, though her pigtails were askew and she was uncomfortably hot in her button-down shirt and cardigan.

"Carlos!" Dorothy Ann cried happily when he answered the door. "Carlos, I just," (breathe), "discovered something incredibly important!" She began massaging her side as she continued to suck air in as rapidly as her side cramp would allow. For his part, Carlos simply stared, his jaw hanging slightly slack as his eyebrows creased in confusion.

"Wait," he said, gesturing at Dorothy Ann with a hand full of fairy lights and wire. "D.A., did you run here? Did you forget your textbook earlier or something?"

Dorothy Ann continued to massage her side. Now that she was standing still, she was also beginning to notice the throbbing in her foot that probably meant she had a new blister. She winced. Saddle shoes clearly weren't meant for running.

"No, I mean yes, I mean no, I didn't forget anything earlier but yes, I did run here."

"And you ran here because…?" Carlos trailed off, leaving Dorothy Ann ample room to fill in the blank.

"Because I was going through my observations and notes just now and I realized that the most probable conclusion one can extrapolate from my data is that you, Carlos Ramon, should take me to the prom."

For a few moments, Carlos just stared at her. The confused look remained on his face, but it was tempered by an expression of complete and utter shock. Dorothy Ann supposed that whatever he thought she might have dropped by for, the last thing he thought it would be about was the prom, so the expression made sense. The look persisted, though, and continued to last for a few moments more. Suddenly, Dorothy Ann's excitement began to transform into apprehension. What if she was wrong about the data? What if that wasn't the conclusion she was supposed to draw at all?

And then Carlos's face changed. He looked… disappointed? No, wait, that couldn't be right. What did Carlos have to be disappointed about?

"Aw, man, D.A.!" he pouted, heaving a hugely put-upon sigh and looking forlornly at the wires and lights he still had in his hand. "I was going to ask all romantically, like the guys in those 80's movies. You know, as long as there was a working power outlet nearby."

"Wait, 80's movies? What? I don't like 80's movies…"

"Oh yeah, that's my cousin who likes those movies. But still!" And here, Carlos pointed at her again with his wires and lights, and somehow, Dorothy Ann began to get the feeling that maybe she had somehow managed to find a way to rain on Carlos's parade. "How can you ask me to the prom when I was going to ask you?"

Dorothy Ann froze, the stitch in her side momentarily forgotten. "You were going to ask me to prom? But wait… you think _I_ asked _you_? But all of my research says that you should ask me."

"And I was going to have your name written in lights and everything – provided we're within extension cord distance of a power outlet, naturally," he added, and Dorothy Ann just nodded. "Basically, it was going to be perfect. No, better than perfect. It was going to be astonishingly amazing. And now," Carlos pouted, staring dejectedly at his supplies like a child staring at a broken toy, "Now, that's all for nothing."

But Dorothy Ann wasn't listening. In fact, she had stopped listening a while ago, somewhere around the part where Carlos had said he was going to ask her to prom. The weight that had settled in her stomach suddenly dissipated, leaving in its place what seemed like a thousand butterflies, each as light as air and winging their way through her veins until she felt as if she were about to burst out of her own skin in happiness. This was most likely why she giggled at that moment, a short, childish laugh that was on the verge of being considered hysterical.

Of course, laughing like that when one's friend is sad never seems to end well, and this instance was no exception.

All that seemed to do in this case was make Carlos even more disheartened. He sighed softly and was about to walk away from the door when Dorothy Ann spoke up.

"Carlos, look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to laugh," she said quickly. "I was just so happy all of a sudden. I've been thinking about this for a while now and I didn't even realize how much it was worrying me, but when I looked at all of the information I just became so excited and worried all at the same time because it all pointed to the prom and you and me. And I couldn't think of anything else I would want to do." The words seemed to tumble out of her mouth without any thought, which was alright with her because if she thought too hard she realized she probably would never say them in the first place. And judging by the fact that Carlos had gone from looking dejected to confused to excited all within the span of her short speech (which took far less time than it should have, since when had she been able to speak so quickly?), she figured that they needed to be said. "What I mean to say is," she concluded, "Well, Carlos, I would love to go to the prom with you."

Dorothy Ann caught a glimpse of a brilliant smile a second before Carlos started cheering and jumping around, unaware that the string of lights he still had in his hand was managing to wrap itself around his legs as he moved. An accidental tug in the wrong direction was all that it took for the strand to tighten fractionally, which was enough to upset his balance. When Dorothy Ann caught him around his shoulders, thus preventing him from splitting his head on the door frame or some equally painful fate, he immediately hugged her back.

She grinned. No dirty soccer uniform or lemonade hands. No strange desire to run off to the bathroom. Just Carlos and her and a very warm, completely wonderful hug. And Mikey and Mr. Ramon, both laughing loudly in the hallway behind them, but that didn't really matter.

"Hey, D.A.?" Carlos asked, his voice still on the verge of laughter and his arms still wrapped around her waist like they belonged there. "Can I still ask you at school? You know, with my amazing lighting display? I promise, you'll be de-lighted!"

The laughter stopped as a collective groan sounded throughout the house.

"CARLOS!"

* * *

><p><strong>Notes: I don't normally write for this fandom, but one of my best friends gave me the prompt, "According to my research, Carlos should take me to the prom," and it turns out I couldn't resist. I don't own Magic School Bus or anything remotely related to it; I wrote this solely for the enjoyment of friends. I hope you all enjoyed it as well.<strong>


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